The Ballers believed when no one else did.
Now, Oakland’s baseball team has its first-ever Pioneer League championship, beating the Idaho Falls Chukars 8–1 at Oakland’s Raimondi Park on Sunday.
Oakland fell behind Idaho 2–0 in a best-of-five series, but came all the way back with three consecutive wins — clinching the Town’s first baseball championship since 1989, when the Athletics still called the Coliseum home.
The Ballers’ second season set records in the Pioneer League — an independent professional league without MLB affiliations —with 73 wins, but the playoffs proved more difficult. The Ogden Raptors pushed the Ballers to three games before Oakland moved on and then found itself on the brink of elimination against the Chukars. Still, the Ballers silenced the naysayers and took home the title, outscoring the Chukars 26–6 in the series.
“We always knew that Oakland was a championship town. When we started a team, it wasn’t just good enough to build a team with the community. We wanted to build a winner,” team co-founder Paul Freedman said after the game.
“And today, we won.”
The independent franchise launched in 2024, in the wake of the Athletics’ announcement of a move to Las Vegas. Many hoped that the Ballers would provide Oakland with some stability following the departures of the city’s three largest sports franchises: the A’s, the Golden State Warriors and the Oakland Raiders. The Town’s last professional sports championship was won by the Warriors in 2018.
With the mission of keeping baseball in Oakland, East Bay-born Freedman and Bryan Carmel founded the Ballers with $2 million in seed funding secured from more than 50 investors. The team also created opportunities for fan ownership in the club with a crowdfunding campaign similar to the one completed by the Oakland Roots and Soul soccer club.
In true Bay Area style, the Ballers made professional sports history earlier this month with a game managed entirely by AI. For one game only, manager Aaron Miles ceded many of his game-time decision-making duties to a machine, the Athletic reported.
On Sunday, Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee thanked the team’s players and fans at the start of the game, and urged the city’s young people to keep believing.
“Champions rise from Oakland,” she said, before opening Game Five with a “Play ball.”
At the end of the game, as players sprayed each other with champagne, Oakland firefighters who had parked their truck across the street to watch the game doused the players and the field with cascades of water.
“It feels like the start of a new chapter for baseball in Oakland. They tried to take baseball out of the town,” Carmel said at a post-game press conference.
But you can never take a Baller out of the Bay.
KQED’s Nina Thorsen contributed to this report.
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